A History of the Church in England

Third Edition

J. R. H. Moorman

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 1980
• ISBN:
  9780819220950
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

A comprehensive history of the Christianity in Great Britain from the Roman Empire, through the Reformation and the 20th century.

This authoritative account of the Church in England covers its history from earliest times to the late twentieth century. Includes chapters on the Roman, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Medieval periods before a description of the Reformation and its effects, the Stuart period, and the Industrial Age, with a final chapter on the modern church through 1972.
"[JRH Moorman's]]] work has all the qualities of that rare achievement, a good textbook. It is written in a plain but eminently readable expository prose... a piece of authentic historical writing, in which the author communicates his interest to the reader without misleading him."? The Times Educational Supplement

PART I

THE ROMAN AND ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD

CHAPTER I

THE CHURCH IN BRITAIN BEFORE 597

i. The Coming of the Faith

The exact date when the Christian message first came to England is unknown. At the time when the Christian Church was gradually extending its influence in the countries on both sides of the Mediterranean, England was in process of being colonized by Rome. Roman legionaries were marching along their own well-made roads, Roman officers were bringing the old British tribes to heel, Roman law was being administered, and one more province was in process of being absorbed into the great Roman Empire which now dominated the known world.

Among those who came from Rome, whether soldiers, administrators, traders or camp-followers, there may well have been some who had heard and accepted the message of the Christian Church and who secretly prayed to the Christians’ God while their fellows did homage to the old gods of the State, or to Mithras or Isis or one of the gods of the mystery religions. But of this we have no certain knowledge. If there were such, they have left no record behind them. But where history is silent, legend and tradition have produced strange and wonderful stories of journeys to this island made by S. Paul or S. Philip or S. Joseph of Arimathea and of the founding of a Christian church at Glastonbury.¹

The first mention of any Christians in Britain is in Tertullian’s tract against the Jews, written about 200, in which he spekks of parts of Britain, inaccessible to the Romans, which had yet been conquered by Christ; while Origen, writing about forty years later, includes Britain among the places where Christians are to be found.² It seems clear, then, that about the year 200 the Christian world was becoming aware of the fact that there were believers in Britain, and it has been suggested that, when the savage persecutions broke out in Gaul in 177, a number of Christians fled northwards and that some may have found their way to these shores.

¹ The earliest written record of S.Joseph of Arimathea is in an addition of. c 1250 to the Chronicle of William of Malmesbury. See J. Armitage Robinson, Two Glastonbury Legends (1926), for a critical study of the tradition.

² A. W. Haddanand W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents (1871), i, pp. 3-4. But see W. H. C. Frend in Christianity in Britain, 300-700, ed. M. W. Barley and R. P. C. Hanson (1968), p. 37.

For the next century or so little is known of these Christians in Britain. The third century was, on the whole, a time of great advance for the Church for, apart from the persecutions of Decius and Valerian (249–60), it was an age of comparative peace and security when books were written, churches built and schools founded. In Britain some organization was being set up, for, by the year 314, there were several bishops in the country, three of whom —Eborius of York, Restitutus of London and Adelphius probably of Colchester¹—attended the Council of Aries. This shows a considerable advance in the establishment of the Church on a diocesan basis, and implies that the scattered Christians of the third century had by now organized themselves into a definite Church. No British bishops are known to have answered the Emperor’s summons to Nicaea in 325, but Athanasius expressly states that the British Church accepted the decisions of that Council.²

The first Christian in Britain whose name is recorded was Alban who, according to Bede, was a layman of the Roman city of Verulamium who gave shelter to a Christian priest fleeing from his persecutors. While the priest lay hid, Alban learnt of the Christian faith and was converted; and when the soldiers came to arrest the fugitive, Alban, dressed in the priest’s cloak, gave himself up, was condemned to death, and martyred on the hill where the abbey church of S. Alban’s now stands. The date is generally assumed to have been 304, during the persecutions of Diocletian.³

With the passing of the Edict of Milan in 312 the Christian Church entered upon a new phase of its history. For three centuries the Christian faith had been classed among the ‘illicit religions’; it had always been to some extent unpopular; and the shadow of persecution had lain over it. By this decree Constantine removed the ban, and for the first time in history the Christian was free to declare his faith openly without fear of a cruel death. From this time onwards a great and rapid advance was made.

¹ The third bishop is styled of the civitas colonia Londinensium, but no name is given. Various suggestions have been made, e.g. Caerleon-on-Usk in Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, i, p. 7; but it is now thought that Colchester is the most likely; M. Deanesly, The Pre-Conquest Church in England (1961), p. 7.

² Ibid. pp. 7-8.

³ Bede, Ecc. Hist, i, 7; cf. C. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica (1896), ii, pp. 17-20. The account, which presents a number of difficulties, also mentions the martyrdom of two Christians, Aaron and Julius, at Caerleon-on-Usk. Bede is here using Gildas; see J. A. Giles, Old English Chronicles, p. 303.

Such an advance must have been made in Britain, but still our evidence is very scant. In 359 some British bishops again attended one of the great councils of the Church, the Council of Rimini; but they were so poor that three of them were driven to accept the imperial offer of money to pay their expenses, though all the other bishops present had refused to do so in order to preserve their independence.¹ This would suggest that the Church in Britain, though becoming more organized, was as yet poor, and no doubt many of its members were drawn from among the semi-Romanized natives who were far from being the most prosperous members of the community. Yet that there were Christians among the richer Romans is proved by the appearance of Christian symbols, such as the Chi-Rho sign, among the mosaic pavements which adorned their villas.²

Apart from such decorations the Christians of the period of the Roman occupation have left little trace of their handiwork. The chief exceptions are the little Christian chapel at Lullingstone in Kent, built about 360 and decorated with mural paintings, and the chapels at Silchester and Hinton St. Mary of about the same period. The chapel at Silchester was a small building, only about 42 feet in length, with an apse at the western end of the nave, aisles, transepts and narthex. The altar appears to have been of wood and the priest celebrated facing west with his back to the congregation. Outside the church was a stone trough where the faithful washed before entering the church.³ No doubt there were other churches in different parts of the country, but few traces of them have so far been found.

ii. Pelagius, Germanus, Ninian

Although the Christian Church by the end of the fourth century had existed in Britain for close on two hundred years, our knowledge of any individual Christians (with the exception of S. Alban) is extremely limited. From this point onwards Church History takes on a new aspect. We leave the mists of conjecture and anonymity and enter into the clearer light in which real personalities can be distinguished.

The first of these was a heretic—Pelagius—the man who roused the fiercest passions of S. Augustine and who has given us the heresy which to this day holds so strong an attraction for the British people. Pelagius was a Romanized Briton and a monk, well-educated, urbane, highly civilized. About the year 380, when he was quite a young man, he left Britain never to return. For the rest of his life he travelled about the Mediterranean world, ‘an elusive and gracious figure, beloved and respected wherever he goes … silent, smiling, reserved’, and he appears to have ended his days in Syria.¹ Pelagius, like some other Christians, had been shocked by the hard and rigid doctrines of S. Augustine, which seemed to him to deny the moral courage and dignity of man. He found it difficult to believe in Original Sin, and so great was his faith in man that he believed it possible for man to reach perfection without the intervention of supernatural grace. It was this which aroused the indignant fervour of Augustine and led to his condemnation.²

¹ Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, i, pp. 9-10.

² See Jocelyn Toynbee’s article in Christianity in Britain, 300-700, pp. 177-92.

³ A. W. Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture (1930), i, pp. 12-13, and M. Deanesly, Sidelights on the Anglo-Saxon Church (1962), pp. 13-14.

Pelagius never taught in Britain, but his doctrines found a footing here through the teaching of one Agricola early in the fifth century. To counteract this the bishops in Gaul invited two bishops to come to Britain—Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre (418–48) and Lupus, Bishop of Troyes (427–79). These two arrived in Britain in 429 and immediately made their presence felt. Germanus had been a soldier and man of action before becoming a bishop, and was obviously a man of great force of character. Finding the British timid and lacking in self-confidence he organized them as a fighting force and, with wild yells of ‘Alleluia’, led them to victory against a marauding army of Picts, probably near Mold in Flintshire. Wherever Germanus went, he encouraged and strengthened the British against their opponents, whether pagan Picts or Pelagian heretics. Striding through the country with a bag of relics round his neck Germanus, by his preaching and by his miracles, convinced all gainsayers and put new life and courage into the British Christians.³

Meanwhile, further north, a more gentle apostle of Christ was at work in the valleys of Cumberland and southern Scotland. This was Ninian who, after studying the monasticism of S. Martin at Marmoutier, came to Britain, apparently as a solitary missionary, perhaps as early as the year 397. At Whithorn in Galloway he founded a monastery built of stone and whitewashed so that it might be the most conspicuous object in the district. This came to be known as the White House, or Candida Casa, and became the base from which Ninian and his monks set out on their evangelistic journeys. These seem to have taken them not only among the savage Pictish tribes in the neighbourhood of the Roman Wall but also up the east coast of Scotland.¹ Whithorn continued to act as a centre of evangelistic enterprise for some time, one of its most famous members being S. Kentigern who worked in Scotland, northern England and Wales early in the sixth century.²

¹ Collingwood and Myres, Roman Britain, pp.308-9.

² See J. F. Bethune Baker, Early History of Christian Doctrine (2nd ed. 1920), pp. 301-20.

³ J Bede, Ecc. Hist, i, 17-21.

iii. S. Patrick

While Ninian was at work in Galloway there was growing up in the west of England a small boy who was soon to make his mark on the history of the expansion of the Church. This was Patrick, the son of a British ‘decurion’ or local administrator called Calpornius who was a deacon and the son of a priest. The family, who lived somewhere near the sea,³ were one day attacked by a gang of pirates young men into slavery, among them Patrick now about fifteen years of age. He was taken to Ireland, where he was kept in captivity as a swineherd; but after six years he escaped, and perhaps spent some time in Gaul where he may have come into contact with the monastic movement under the leadership of S. Martin of Tours. While he was undergoing his training he conceived a desire to return to the scenes of his captivity in order that he might preach the Gospel to the men among whom he had lived and suffered. After visiting his old home in Britain he was, in the year 432, consecrated as bishop for work in Ireland and immediately returned there as the apostle of Christ.

¹ See W. D. Simpson, St. Ninian and the Origins of the Christian Church in Scotland (1940), and J. MacQueen, St. Ninia\ a Study of literary and linguistic evidence (1961).

² For Kentigern see K. H. Jackson The Sources for the Life of St. Kentigern^, in Studies in the Early British Church, ed. N. K. Chadwick (1958).

³ Attempts to locate the place of Patrick’s birth and childhood have all ended in failure; see R. P. C. Hanson, Saint Patrick (1968), pp. 113-6.

For the next thirty years Patrick fought a hard battle against the paganism of the Irish tribes, and his life was often in danger. He travelled widely in Ireland and made many converts, baptizing them by the thousand and ordaining clergy everywhere. He attempted to introduce the diocesan system which he had studied in Gaul, but it failed chiefly through lack of any cities which could form the centres of government. The only diocese which had any kind of permanence was that of Armagh where Patrick himself ruled. But if the diocesan system failed, the monasteries which Patrick founded became the chief feature of the Irish Church. The Irish monasteries were quite unlike those of the rest of Europe, as was also the relationship between a bishop and an abbot. Whereas in the usual system the bishop had general oversight of the monasteries in his diocese, in the Celtic plan the abbot ruled supreme and often had a number of bishops among his choir-monks. The monastery, in fact, was little more than ‘an e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I: The Roman and Anglo-Saxon Period
• Part II: The Middle Ages
• Part III: The Reformation and After
• Part IV: The Industrial AGB
• Additional Note on Books
• Index